Laundry Day
by FieryArtemis
Summary: Hiro wrapped his hand around the GPS tracker and grit his teeth. Tadashi would have put a tracker on him. That was one hundred percent a Tadashi move!-Hiro discovers the tracking devices that Tadashi sewed into his clothes. Oneshot Warning: Mild swearing.


**A/N: **So upon finding out that Tadashi sewing tracking devices into Hiro's clothes was canon, I decided that I had to explore the idea of what happens when Hiro discovers them. It lead to this. I imagine that this happens about a month or so after the events of the movie so Tadashi's death is still a pretty raw wound.

* * *

"I just need you to wash a couple loads. It won't take you long. You can do it while you work on your calculus for school." Hiro muttered under his breath as he kicked a shirt out of his way in the cramped laundry room. "Didn't tell me that you had, like, five loads of laundry already in the laundry room Aunt Cass."

Hiro dropped the blue laundry basket he was holding. It hit the ground with a heavy thud but not even that was enough to assuage his irritation with his Aunt. Pile after pile of dirty clothes filled every inch of the small room that the washer and dryer inhabited. Seriously! There were so many clothes that it made the room feel cramped and prevented Hiro from seeing the floor. Experimentally he lifted up some of the dirty laundry up with his foot. He was rewarded with a view of a small square of the linoleum. He tipped his foot down again to let the dirty clothes fall once more. However, not all the clothes slipped off. One of Aunt Cass's undergarments remained wrapped up and over his foot. "Gah!" he sputtered as he shook his foot violently to get the garment off, "I am _not_ touching those."

He gave one last shudder and backed up, surveying the carnage in front of him. Yeah, Aunt Cass was crazy if she thought he was going to be able to make through all of this before she came back from her meeting with the San Fransokyo's Small Business Owners' Guild. Hiro heaved a sigh. It was going to take all afternoon just to make a half way decent dent in the laundry. However, he'd said that he help her out and do a few loads so he needed to do it.

But he was not touching Aunt Cass's undergarments. No way, no how!

Hiro bent down and started throwing clothes to either end of the laundry room to make a space to sort clothes. He'd learned from one of Tadashi's past mistakes that you didn't wash certain colors with other certain colors. The pair of them had walked around wearing pink shirts for the better part of a month after Tadashi had washed one of Hiro's new red shirts in with all their white shirts. Aunt Cass hadn't been able to look at them without snickering every time they passed by her in the cafe. He was also fairly convinced that she'd put off buying them new shirts just for the simple fact that she got a kick out of seeing her two nephews wear faded pink shirts. Yeah, he was not about to have a repeat of the fiasco. Especially now that there was no one other than his Aunt to share his embarrassment with.

After a few minutes, he had the laundry sorted into like colored coded piles. He had kicked his Aunt's undergarments to the farthest corner though. The results weren't nearly as daunting as he first anticipated. There were probably only like five or six loads to do. The size of the room just made it look like more Hiro supposed. He took stock of what was going on. Whites and lights were the smallest of the piles and mainly consisted of Aunt Cass's stuff. Towels were the biggest since they had to wash stuff for the cafe. "I'm gonna split the difference and do the darks first." he mumbled to himself as he switched the settings on the washer and let it start.

The sound of water rushing into the washer filled the laundry room along with the scent of Aunt Cass's favorite detergent as Hiro grabbed the first handful of dark colored clothing. A few of his shirts and Aunt Cass's jeans. He remembered a little too late that he was supposed to check through the pockets to make sure that there wasn't anything in there. Aunt Cass's motto was she who does the laundry keeps the change inside the pockets. However, she also had a penchant for leaving tissues and receipts in her pockets and he didn't particularly find the idea of walking around in a hoodie flecked with white paper particularly enjoyable. By the time he managed to fish the jeans out of the water again, they were soggy and dripping. Hiro made a face but dutifully went through the pockets. Good thing too because he managed to find at least two receipts in just one pair of Aunt Cass's jeans.

He grabbed the next handful of dark clothes and gave them a good shake to separate one of his hoodies from another pair of jeans. There was a faint noise as something came loose and hit the ground with a small clatter. Hiro looked down, expecting to see a penny or something on the ground. It had fallen from his own clothes and he was the epitome of a poor, broke college student so it couldn't be anything bigger than a penny. It wasn't a penny though or a quarter or any other sort of coin. It was a small, black, and oblong in shape. Hiro raised his eyebrow at it and threw the clothes in his hand over the dryer before bending down to pick the tiny object up. "What is this thing?" he muttered to himself as he turned it over and examined it.

There were tiny circuits and a miniature hard drive disk on the opposite side of it. Hiro frowned. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say this looked like a GPS chip."

Shock ran through him. That's because it was a GPS chip! Hiro went pale. Who'd planted a GPS tracker on him? His very first instinct was to smash it into even tinier pieces. He and his friends had gone up against a bank robber the other night. Was it possible that the crook had managed to slip the tracker on to him? Did they know where he lived now? Was Aunt Cass in danger? Would destroying it even…

His mind screeched to a halt. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute." he said shaking his head. He had obviously spent way too much time with Fred and his crazy Superhero conspiracy theories. The GPS chip had come out of his hoodie. He didn't wear his hoodies to bust bad guys. He was acting ridiculous.

All the same though…

Hiro reached over and grabbed his hoodie off the dryer. Why had he had a GPS tracker in his hoodie in the first place? He ran his hand over the fabric of his hoodie. His hand hit a snag in the fabric on the hood where a hole had been worn in the hem. Hiro took the hood in both hands, eyebrows furrowed, and raised it closer to his face for better examination. He could see where someone had picked out the original seam and then restitched it, going back over the original stitches with near perfect precision that it was nearly imperceptible. Hiro had never noticed it before, and probably never would have if there hadn't been a hole worn through the fabric. That was where the tracker had probably come out from. Okay, next question… who had taken the time to sew a GPS chip into his hoodie?

Then it hit him.

"That bastard Tadashi! So that's how he was able to find me everytime I went to a bot fight." Hiro growled. He wrapped his hand around the GPS tracker and grit his teeth. Tadashi _would_ have put a tracker on him. That was one hundred percent a Tadashi move! The ass probably used his cell phone to monitor the GPS. How dare he. This had to be a violation of his civil rights or something. When he got his hands on his brother, Hiro was going to…

Then Hiro stopped up short. He was never going to get his hands on Tadashi again. The realization came crashing down over the top of his head like a bucket of ice water and a sharp pain, like that of a knife, slid into his gut.

Shakingly, Hiro uncurled his hand from around the GPS chip. There was an indentation of it on his palm from where he'd crushed it into his skin. It was well made and most likely expensive. Hiro didn't even doubt that Tadashi had probably put other chips into his other hoodies which meant that Tadashi had shelled out a lot of money for them. One tracker alone had to cost a hundred dollars at least. His brother had cared so much about him that he'd spent money that he really didn't have on sophisticated GPS trackers all to make sure he could find him at a moments notice.

All the times that Tadashi had just happened to show up in the middle of some run down, back alley for no other word than a simple 'hey' and a smirk before dragging him home again. All the instances where he'd just popped up in bot fight ring and smooth talked their way out of a dangerous situation. All those nights Tadashi had come careening in on his moped right in the nick of time to rescue him from a crew of thugs. That was all because of the stupid little GPS tracker in his hoodie. This was the lengths his brother had gone to keep him safe. That was how much Tadashi had loved and cared for him.

He'd always watched over him. Followed him to the darkest parts of San Fransokyo. Gotten more than one black eye from some over muscled crony because of him. Hell, he'd even been thrown in jail once for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, Hiro never had to worry about what was going to happen. He'd never had to prepare for the worst. He never had to consider what he was going to do if he was cornered. Not once had Hiro feared being beaten within an inch of his life and left to die in some murky puddle. Yeah, Hiro had come close a few times to serious danger but Tadashi always saved him. Tadashi always kept him safe. Tadashi was always there. _Always_.

And now he wasn't.

Tadashi would never tail him to a back alley bot fight ever again. Tadashi would never convince another mob boss that beating up a fourteen year old kid wasn't worth his time. Tadashi would never frown at the sight of Megabot again. Hiro hadn't gone within a two mile radius of a bot fight since the night Tadashi had dragged him to the Nerd Lab but he always thought that… Tadashi would be right around the corner to keep him safe, to look after him. He'd taken that fact for granted.

Hiro sank to the ground in the laundry room, cupping the tiny GPS tracker in his hand and tears streaming down his face.

That was how Aunt Cass found him nearly an hour and half later. On the ground, surrounded by dirty clothes, cradling the GPS chip for dear life, and crying silently. Not a single load of laundry had been done. Not a single calculus problem had been solved.


End file.
